Thursday, June 24, 2010

... you care.

"We essentially want to ping a succession of transients into the machine in one language while accumulating a frequency distribution of unnamed patterns. Once a threshold has been reached, starting with the most frequent, suggested names will be generated. They in turn will be fed back to input filters to determine whether or not the suggested names are retaining their meaning.", it said.

The suggestion to have the voice speak as naturally as possible made a big difference in his own perception. The arguments against it in the beginning were pretty compelling. After all, how arbitrary was such an effort? But the intuition vs. 'makes sense' tradeoff had shown the same result, time and again. Even today, the non-explicit mechanisms at the heart of communication meaning were still beyond easy reach and were absolutely key to real-time categorization, sorting and the like.

Infrastructure people, especially the hardware folks, still wanted to hold the target in their sites and were able to accelerate the tracking of such. But cognition was about multi-dimensional change and they knew it. Putting together those application stacks that supported the very definition of flexible in the cognition space presented the new set of priorities.

The exercise just completed, at first blush, seemed a complete diversion or at the very least, so far removed from the task at hand as to be inconsequential. The surprise? This was the hidden architecture that so long eluded them.

Patterns of nurturance and how they had heretofore looked at them were key in the foundational framework that made that holiest of grails, flexibility possible but self limiting.

The gender dialog module they were researching was more than just balancing out the next obvious bottleneck. It looked as though what it would reveal how efficient evolution of flexibility might best be structured in the machine. The tendency to repress what seemed now to be obvious, especially with such vigor, raised a new question that simply could not be ignored.